Agence France Presse August 11, 2006
Analysis: Playing cat and mouse with airline terrorists
WASHINGTON - Slaughter in the sky on a par with September 11, 2001 seems to have been averted, but the new plot to destroy multiple US airliners shows the race against terrorist ingenuity never ends.
Analysts said details that have leaked out of a London-based scheme allegedly involving liquid explosives to be mixed in flight reveal that terrorists have spotted new loopholes in aviation security.
"We are racing in a sense against terrorist intelligence," US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told CNN.
"The terrorists continue to retool their devices to defeat other defences and we constantly revise our defences to defeat their devices."
The plot is the latest step in the evolution of the threat to civilian aviation -- from plain hijacking to suitcase bombs, then suicide hijackings, and now to liquid-based portable bombs.
"You have a whole movement into different forms of carrying devices on to bring an aircraft down," said Radford Jones, a former US Secret Service agent, now at the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice.
"You have to try to keep up with the threat out there, which is constantly changing. A terrorist organisation has intelligence (capabilities) just as well as our governments."
September 11 hijackers used box cutters to turn fuel-laden airliners into flying bombs; would-be terrorists now appear to have spotted gaps in security for carry-on luggage.
"Carry-ons have received ... much less scrutiny than checked baggage," said Robert Poole, an airline security expert who advised four US presidential administrations and is now with the Reason Foundation.
Current security "focuses on the pre-9/11 world in which the threat is seen as the Pam Am/Lockerbie type -- hide a bomb in somebody's checked suitcase -- rather than the post-9/11 reality of suicide bombers, willing to go down with the plane."
Aviation authorities must now decide how to meet the new threat.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said one approach may be to limit the size of containers passengers can carry.
"You are never going to be able to prevent somebody from bringing onboard a bomb that would be big enough to punch out a window -- but you would need something the size of your fists to do substantial damage to the fuselage," he said.
Some experts are surprised liquids have not been tackled before -- especially since they formed part of the thwarted plot to bring down US airliners over the Pacific in the 'Bojinka' plot in 1995.
Poole said the best way to improve aviation security would be to target the most suspicious passenger groups.
"You obviously need to close a loophole but the better way to do it is to shift to a much more risk-based policy" and dispense with the idea "that... everyone is equally likely to be a threat," said Poole.
Such a system has been resisted by critics who say it would degenerate into racial profiling and infringe privacy concerns.
"It's the harsh unfortunate world we live in," said Poole, also calling for a system of registered frequent travellers who are deemed less of a potential threat than other passengers.
But whatever is done, terrorists will just sit and wait for new vulnerabilities to emerge.
"What we need to do is set up a policy that makes absolute security sense, and stick with that policy," said Jones.
"Say, six months from now it loosens up, and if you are a terrorist, you are going to sit back and look at that, see what happens and then modify your actions accordingly."
Aviation security is a balance between convenience and safety -- it would be possible to install a more stringent system, but people would have to show up at airports hours before they fly.
And then, terrorist would have won a partial victory.
"I think what they figure out, even more than get around security, is how to gum up the works. That is almost as effective as a tool, as actually succeeding," said Ted Collins, CEO of MissionMode, a firm which installs a computerised system used by airports and airlines in emergencies.
And there is only one way to have 100 percent safety, said Pike.
"The challenge is that the only way to make the transportation system completely secure is not to fly."
© Copyright 2006, Agence France Presse
